(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay

by Tad Williams

  It was very strange, then, that as the sun slipped down the sky toward evening Briony found herself wandering through the dense trees of the Whitewood, with the road and the bridge lost somewhere behind her and no real memory of how she had come there.

  There’s sky above me. There—a little. Between the branches. That is sky, isn’t it? It’s still day, I can see, so there must be sky somewhere.

  She lurched a few more steps toward a place where the trees seemed farther apart, where the branches would not pull at her. Already her cloak was in tatters.

  Food. So hungry. What will I…?

  Something had caught at the boyish trousers she wore. Brambles. She pulled herself free, only vaguely noticing new scratches on hands already crisscrossed with bloody little lines. Thank all the gods the cold was making her fingers numb! She wept to realize she had forgotten again which direction she had set herself to walk.

  “Cloudy-eyed, line-handed,” she named herself, mangling the famous story—and not entirely on purpose. She tried to laugh but could only make a ragged hooting noise. Barrick would think that was funny, she decided. He hated learning those stories.

  But it was about her, that story. Well, no, not about her, but about Zoria, and hadn’t that Matty Wringtight fellow, that poet, said that she was Zoria? A virgin princess? Wrongly stolen from her father’s house?

  But I ran away. It was the house that was stolen.

  It didn’t matter. She had always felt deeply about Zoria, the daughter of Perin. When she had been a little girl the tales of Perin and Siveda and Erivor and the others had interested her, but it was the tale of Zoria the merciful, Zoria the pure, brave shield-maiden, that had inspired her. Although she knew many of the old tales and romances, it was only the poems about Zoria she had learned by heart. She recited the line out loud—haltingly at first, then with more strength. It gave her a rhythm to push through the brambles, a marching cadence to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  “…Clear-eyed, lion-hearted, her mind turned toward the day when her honor will again be proclaimed, the Lady of the Doves walks out into the night, toward the fires of her family.”

  Briony had little strength, and the words came out as scarcely more than a croaking murmur, but it was a pleasure to hear any voice, even if it was her own, so she said it again.

  “…Clear-eyed, lion-hearted, her mind turned toward the day when her honor will again be proclaimed, the Lady of the Doves walks out into the night, toward the fires of her family.”

  She had to stop for a moment while a coughing fit shook her. The next part of the tale was something about walking and singing. That seemed appropriate: she was walking right now, and she supposed she was singing, too, after a fashion. Branches slapped at her, wet leaves against her face like angry kisses, making it hard to think, but at last she came up with the next lines:

  “Walking, she sings, and singing, Perin’s virgin daughter is truly free, despite her terrible wound and unstanched blood.”

  Briony felt better with something to think about, and it fit her mood of self-pity to think of how Zoria too had suffered. Merciful goddess, she prayed, think of me and help me through these days of sorrow. In Gregor of Syan’s famous romance, the ice and snow had seemed to fill the world. Briony could still think clearly enough to be grateful that there was no snow here under the trees, but it was still cold enough to make her shiver. The pattering rain was coming down harder now, drizzling heavily through open spaces in the cover. These little waterfalls became another obstacle to be avoided as she trudged on, along with the worst of the brambles and the fallen trees.

  Somebody came to help Zoria, she remembered—one of the other gods. Wouldn’t that be fine, to be saved by a god! Except that god hadn’t really saved her, had he…?

  “Zosim the Helper, grandson of old Kernios the Earth Master, hears Perin’s daughter’s tripping footfalls and offers to show her the way, but the night’s shadows are long and confusing even for the grandchild of the Lord of Owls, and the dark magic of Everfrost delays them.

  “Thus the Moon King’s fate is marked and sealed by the mysteries of his own great house…”

  Whatever that meant. Her voice trailed off.

  A shadow seemed to jump from behind one tree to another at the top of the rise. Briony stopped, heart beating fast. She squinted but could make out nothing among the paper-white birches except the columns of weak sunlight between the trunks, each one shot through with falling rain so that they looked like pillars of smoky glass and diamonds.

  Could it be a wolf? She touched the hilt of the long Yisti knife sheathed in her belt. She knew she might be able to fight one wolf, perhaps even kill it if she was lucky—but they hunted in packs, didn’t they? For a moment she was overwhelmed by a dark vision of herself surrounded by wolves in a wet, lonely forest as darkness came on. She began to cry.

  “Most beasts of forest and field are more afraid of you than you are of them,” her father had once told her, and she tried hard to believe it now. “They are right to fear us, of course—we men are more likely to be their death than the other way around.”

  “That’s me!” she said aloud, as harshly as she could. “Your death!” Nothing moved, no sound except the rain broke the silence after her words had echoed away. Briony coughed again and shook her head, leaned in toward the slope and started to clamber up again, scratching her hands as she grabbed for roots and vines when the way was steep.

  “When morning’s sun rises…”

  she sang out, loud enough for the wolves to hear, trying to make her voice steady enough to scare them away,

  “…All father Perin rides with the gods of his house behind him, the lightnings in his hands and his eye full of fury. The shining towers of Everfrost loom above the icy earth, burning with a pallid gleam like twilight, like bone, and a moat of killing ice surrounds it.”

  The story was making her feel cold again. She realized her hood had fallen back and her hair was getting soaked.

  “Before his own door stood the Moonlord in shimmering armor of ivory and electrum, pale hair blowing, with his great sword Silverbeam in his hand.”

  Just before she reached the top of the rise she saw the shape once more, a movement of darkness a score of paces ahead. Afraid to see it too closely, fearful that it was some predatory beast moving just ahead of her and that the sight of it would freeze her throat, she raised her scratchy voice even louder.

  “‘Go away from my door, Cousin,’” speaks Khors. “‘You ride unasked in the Moon’s Land, on the sovereign road of Everfrost. You have no rights here. This is not vasty Xandos, citadel of the gods.’

  “‘I have the right of a father,’” bellows Perin, ‘and you have stolen that right from me when you stole my daughter! Set her here before me, then never cross into my lands again, and I will let you live.’”

  At the top of the rise Briony could make out only a deer track or old streambed at the base of the hill on the far side, a snaking line of reddish mud. It was nothing like a road, but at least it was a direction and she would not be pulling berry brambles from her feet at each step. She made her way down toward it with cautious speed, aware for the first time in some hours that if she stumbled or slipped and broke her leg she would certainly die here. When she reached the stripe of rust-colored mud she raised her voice again in a note of ragged triumph, a hymn to her newfound path.

  When you are this badly beaten, she thought distractedly, climbing over a huge, damp trunk, terrified that it might start rolling downward while she was on it—when you are this badly beaten, you must take any victory you can find.

  “No one orders me on my own lands,” Khors cries, “and least of all a braggart like you, Lord Storm-Cloud, heavy with thunder like a tempest that blows and blows but does nothing more. She belongs to me now. The dove is mine.

  “Thief! Liar!” shouts Perin. “Now you shall learn for yourself whether this storm is all wind, like the stables of Strivos, full of his godlike stallions
of the blowing gale, or whether it brings lightning, too!”

  She reached the bottom of the hill at last, muddy and panting until her lungs ached in her chest, but she had a clear track for walking now and she wanted to go as far as she could before the light failed.

  And then what? a silent voice asked her—her own voice, the sensible part she thought she had lost somewhere on the road outside the forest. Then what? You cannot even make a fire, and in any case the wood is all wet. Will you sit on a damp rock all night and try to keep the wolves at bay with your knife? And the next night? And the next…?

  No. Quiet! What else can I do? Go forward. Go forward. She raised her voice again, just as Allfather Perin raised high his weapon against his daughter’s kidnapper. Run, wolves! Run, all you enemies!

  “And with that he lifts his mighty hammer Oak Tree and rides at Khors and the world shakes at the sounds of his golden car, the very mountains swaying to the drumbeat of his horses’ hooves.

  “Khors is fearful, but rides out himself on his white horse, brandishing Silverbeam his potent blade, swinging the great net his father Sveros had given him, in which once the old god had captured the stars of the sky.”

  When the two meet it is as the shock of a thunderclap, so that all gods in both armies, who would have rushed at each other, must instead fight to keep their feet beneath them. Indeed, some like Yarnos of the Snows are thrown to the ground; Strivos is one, and as he lies there he is almost destroyed by Azinor of the Onyenai, always swift to strike and eager to slay his father’s enemies.

  “Back and forth across the great icy field upon which stands Everfrost the gods give battle, the light unto the dark, Perin and his brothers against Khors and the spawn of Old Mother Night, and ever hangs the balance on the cast of a spear, the flight of an arrow, the thrust of a sword, even the blink of a blood-spattered eye.

  “White-Handed Uvis is wounded by a blow of Kernios’ great spear, but Birin, Lord of the Evening Mist, meets his doom when the arrows of the Onyenai pierce his throat. The car of courageous Volios is thrown down by the bullish strength of Zmeos the horned one, and the war-god is trapped beneath it, his bones broken, his voice crying out to his uncles for vengeance. Even the great river Rimetrail is thrown from its banks by the force of their fighting, and flows brokenly in many directions.”

  She was following the deer track now. It was wider than it had looked, as though not deer but herds of cattle had made it, just as they had scraped the wide drover’s roads across the valleys and hills of Southmarch from the farmlands into the city’s markets. The relative ease of passage lifted her heart, although the rain was still falling and her face and hands were still numb. If there were wolves near her, then her proclaiming of the Lay of Everfrost was keeping them well at bay.

  “In the forest, virgin Zoria is lost in the snow,” Briony bellowed, but the wet trees swallowed most of the echoes, “the Almond Princess pulled away from the aiding hand of Zosim by the wrath of Old Winter, so that she cannot see her fingers before her eyes, and can hear only the shriek of the snowy winds. Only a short distance away her family fights and dies for her honor, and everywhere else the screams of gods overtop even the storm.

  “Lost, her eyes shut against the wailing winds, her face bloodied by sleet, she stumbles. Lost, she wanders in howling darkness, and does not know that on the other side of the darkly sheltering, confounding wood, all is war, all is death, as her cousins murder her cousins and the endless snows cover all…”

  Briony fell silent, not because she had forgotten the words, the touching words that described how Zoria began her long wandering even as the Great War of the Gods blazed in earnest, but because something was definitely moving on the path ahead of her. The late afternoon light was beginning to weaken, but she could think of nothing but that shape just at the edge of sight, something dark that walked upright.

  She smothered her first impulse to shout to the figure for help. After all, who would live in such a place? A kind woodsman, who would take her to his cottage and give her soup, like something in the stories of her childhood? More likely it was some half-savage madman who would ravage her or worse. She drew the longer of her knives and held it in her hand. The shape was moving away from her, so perhaps whoever or whatever it was hadn’t heard her. But how could that be possible? She had been shouting loud enough to knock the leaves off the trees. Perhaps he was deaf.

  A deaf madman. The prospects only get better and better, she thought sourly. Briony did not quite notice it, but something of her old self had come back to her as she stumbled through the trees crying old lines of poetry.

  She walked a little faster, ignoring the ache in her legs, and she called out no more of Zoria’s tale. Gregor’s famous words may have kept her going but the time for them was over, at least for a while.

  Another few hundred paces and she caught sight of the shape again, and this time could see it a little more clearly: it was manlike, walking on two legs, but seemed strangely bent, humped on its back beyond even the deformities of age, and she felt a thrill of superstitious fear run along her spine. What was it? Some half-human thing, part man, part animal? As the darkness came on would it tilt forward and run on all fours?

  Despite her terror, she knew she must have food and shelter soon, even at risk that she was chasing some forest demon. She hurried on, moving as quickly and quietly as she could, trying to get a better look at whatever walked the path ahead of her.

  At last, when she had closed the distance to only a hundred paces or so, she saw that the shape was not as unnatural as she’d feared: whatever walked before her in a dark cloak and hood carried a bundle of wood on its back. Her heart, which had been a stone in her chest, now lightened. A person, at least—not something with teeth and claws.

  She thought it might be good to call now, with enough room between them to allow an escape if the other seemed dangerous. She stopped and shouted, “Halloo! Halloo, there! Can you help me? I’m lost!”

  The dark figure slowed and stopped, then turned. For a moment she saw a hint of the face in the deep hood, of white hair and bright eyes as the wood carrier stared back at her, then the shape turned back to the path and hurried on.

  “Gods’ curses!” Briony screamed hoarsely. “I mean you no harm!” And she began to trot after the shape as fast as her tremblingly weary legs would carry her. But although the figure before her seemed to move no faster than she would expect of an aged woodcutter carrying a heavy burden, she could not seem to close the distance. She dug ahead as hard as she could, but still she could get no closer to the dark shape. “Wait! I don’t want to hurt you! I’m hungry and I’m lost!”

  The wide path looped between the trees, rising and falling, and the figure appeared and disappeared in the growing shadows. Briony’s mind was full of old stories again, about malevolent fairies and will-o’-the-wisps who led travelers from their rightful path to their doom in the forest or marsh.

  But I’m already lost! she thought miserably. Where would the glory be in that? She even shouted it, but the silent shape before her seemed to pay no attention.

  At last, just before she was about to drop to her knees in surrender, give up on the mysterious figure and resign herself to another night alone in cold, rain-spattered despair, the dark-cloaked shape turned from the path—slowly, as if determined that Briony should take notice—and disappeared through the undergrowth into the thickest part of the wood. When she reached that spot on the path, Briony looked carefully but could see nothing unusual. If she had not seen the figure turn, she would have had no idea where it had gone.

  Trap, a part of her warned, but that part was not strong enough to rule a mind so hungry and lonely and distraught. She turned off the track into the deep woods, her knife held out before her. Within a few steps she found herself on a steep slope, and after a few more paces stepped down out of the trees into a quiet, grassy dell. A campsite stood at the foot of the hollow—a rickety wagon, a sway-backed horse tied beside it cropping grass,
and a fire. Standing beside the fire was the dark-cloaked shape she had trailed, the bundle of firewood lying on the ground at its feet.

  The figure threw back the hood of the wet cloak, revealing a tangle of white hair and a face so old and so lined that at first Briony could not be sure if it was male or female.

  “You took long enough, daughter,” the ancient creature said. The voice marked her as a woman, although just barely, a throaty rasp halfway between a chuckle and a growl. “I thought I would have to lie down and have a nap to give you time to catch up.”

  Briony still had the knife out, but it seemed more important to bend double and keep her hands on her knees instead while she struggled to catch her breath. This was followed by a coughing fit that made her whimper at the pain in her chest. At last she straightened up. “I…couldn’t…catch you…”

  The old, old woman shook her head. “I fear for the breed,” was all she said, then began laying new faggots on the fire. “Sit down, child. I can see you’re ill—I’ll have to do something about that. Are you hungry, too?”

  “Who…who are you? I mean, yes—Oh, gods, yes, I’m starving.”

  “Good. We’ll make you work for your supper, but I suppose you should rest and recover a bit first.” The old woman gave her a sharp look. It was like being stared at by a wild beast. Briony’s heart tripped again. The woman’s eyes were not blue or green or even brown, but black and shiny as volcano glass. “One thing we won’t ask you to do is sing. We’ve had quite enough of that tuneless caterwauling.”

  Even in the midst of all these unexpected happenings, Briony was stung. “I was just trying to keep myself going.” She slumped to the ground and tucked the knife back into its sheath, still finding it hard to get her breath. The old woman was scarcely as high as Briony’s own shoulder and looked to weigh no more than a roast Orphanstide duck.